About Grassroots
Grassroots is a new platform of The Journal of Political Ecology (JPE) dedicated to the
publication of short pieces about trans-local environmental realities. It is a platform for
those movements concerned with the politics of sustainability, pluriverse possibilities,
natural resources access and related social inequalities in both rural and urban settings.
In the midst of a global environmental crisis, the objective of this platform is to reveal
and circulate local experiences, stories and reflections on the politics of environmental
change and world making that can spark political and academic debate. We believe that this
type of platform has the potential to inform and contribute to transforming the way in which
we do political ecology today, as well as to strengthen the ties between social movements
and academia. We welcome individual or collaborative work between activists and political
ecologists or related social scientists at any stage of their careers. This work can take
the form of activist pieces, academic reflections, engaged scholarship or creative work
addressing political ecology debates that are based on particular cases or rooted in direct
experience.
Artwork: Natalia Eddem Lizárrage, Gotita de agua (water droplet). Made for “Forest Trends event”.
We are interested in grassroots' initiatives that envision sustainable ways of inhabiting
and co-constructing the planet as well as critical reflections on political ecology,
political ontology and environmentalism. We are also interested in the challenges of
sovereignty, environmental conflicts and ontological equivocations faced by local
populations when attempting to influence the way in which natural resources are governed in
particular settings. We publish short case studies of local resource governance and
other-than-human relations, effects of globalisation in domestic politics, multi-scalar
strategic alliances between grassroots movements, as well as explicit and implicit processes
of environmental awareness-building and resistance. We invite pieces in a variety of
formats, including written articles and visual essays based on pictures, videos, interviews
or other creative expressions.
The urgency of the global sustainability issues we are currently confronted with, demands that we listen to all voices including those that have been marginalized in the Global South. While our objective is to provide a space for debate, we do not attempt to further any particular interest or adopt any specific position. Thus, we encourage the publication of dissenting grassroots' voices. The opinions of the authors are entirely their own and do not reflect the position of JPE. The pieces published in this section are first evaluated by the editorial board of the Journal and are then reviewed by one external referee.
